Reflection — A Lineage of Looking: Towards the PhD

As I begin to assemble my proposal for doctoral research, I find myself reflecting not only on the research I want to undertake, but on the much longer trajectory that has brought me to this point. Increasingly, the PhD feels like the next logical step in my development as an artist, photographer and researcher. It does not represent a new beginning so much as the continuation — and perhaps consolidation — of a lifetime of looking, making, learning and questioning.

My relationship with photography precedes my own practice. It reaches back through my family and into an earlier period of photographic history.

My parents were commercial photographers, as was my father’s sister, Anna Riethmuller Smith. Their photographic training took place in Toowoomba: my aunt in the later 1920s and my parents during the 1930s. They trained within a photographic studio tradition that had been established before 1900 and consequently retained connections with processes and working methods reaching back into the early history of photography.

I grew up, therefore, with photography not simply as something one did with a camera, but as a physical, technical and material process. Photography involved cameras and lenses, certainly, but also film, chemicals, negatives, darkrooms, papers, surfaces and the manipulation of the photographic image by hand. My early learning included darkroom processes, negative retouching and the hand-colouring of sepia photographs. Long before the digital image made photographic alteration apparently effortless, I understood that a photograph was something constructed through a succession of decisions and interventions.

This history has given me, I believe, a particular perspective on photography. The movement within my current practice towards what I have begun to describe as expanded image-making may appear contemporary, but in another sense it returns me to something I have always understood: that the photographic image has never been entirely fixed or autonomous. It can be exposed, developed, retouched, coloured, printed, transferred, layered, reproduced, reinterpreted and transformed.

My first camera came from my aunt Anna: a Kodak Retina IIC. I still have it.

The continued presence of that camera is important to me. It is simultaneously a photographic instrument, a family object and an object of memory. It connects my own practice physically to the person who first placed a camera in my hands and, beyond her, to an earlier photographic lineage. In the context of my present research into objects, memory, identity and the archive, I now recognise that the Retina occupies precisely the territory that has increasingly preoccupied my work. It is not simply an old camera I have retained. It carries a history.

From those beginnings, photography has accompanied me throughout my life.

The technologies have changed repeatedly. I have worked with Kodak transparency film, 35mm and roll film, sheet film, medium-format and large-format cameras, analogue and digital cameras, and now the iPhone. I have photographed in Australia, Britain, Israel, Jordan, New York, Germany and throughout Europe.

The inclusion of the iPhone in this progression is significant. It might initially appear to sit at the opposite end of photographic practice from the deliberateness of the large-format camera, but I increasingly recognise both as legitimate instruments of seeing. The large-format camera slows observation down; the iPhone allows an immediate response to the unexpected. One requires preparation and intention; the other can accompany me almost invisibly through everyday life. My recent photographic practice has demonstrated that each can generate quite different forms of attention.

The technologies have not, therefore, simply replaced one another. They have accumulated.

That accumulation now seems particularly significant.

My artistic development has similarly been cumulative rather than linear. It has occurred through a lifelong commitment to self-development: through making, reading, travelling, looking at art, experimenting with materials, undertaking formal study and, importantly, learning from other people.

Among those people has been Denis Crawford, whose practice brought together photography with the close observation and documentation of the natural world. Dr Les Walkling’s extraordinary understanding of photography, printing and the photographic image expanded my appreciation of both the technical and conceptual possibilities of the medium. Dr Shane Hulbert, first through my studies at RMIT and subsequently through an ongoing dialogue, has contributed significantly to the way I think about photography, contemporary image-making and, increasingly, the relationship between artistic practice and research.

My postgraduate experience at RMIT also brought the important influence of the late Dr Richard Harding. As one of my Master’s supervisors, Richard encouraged an engagement with printmaking and a broader understanding of what an image might become once it moved beyond the boundaries of a single medium. His influence remains present in my continuing movement between photography, printmaking and other forms of image-making.

Dr Kellyann Gerts has also contributed to this continuing intellectual and artistic development, forming part of the wider community of artists, academics and practitioners through whom my thinking about practice, research and artistic development has evolved.

My engagement with printmaking has been extended considerably through Robin Ezra and Annie Day — the Printmaking Sisters. Workshops undertaken with them over a number of years strengthened both my technical understanding of printmaking and my appreciation of its possibilities for photographic imagery. Their approach helped reinforce the idea that the photograph need not remain a photographic print: it can become a matrix, an impression, a layer, a surface and a starting point for further transformation.

This relationship eventually carried me to Il Bisonte in Florence, where printmaking has become another important strand in the continuing development of my practice. My proposed return to Il Bisonte for an extended period now feels less like the introduction of another medium than a return to, and deepening of, something already embedded within the practice.

Learning has not occurred only through formal teaching relationships. Fellow practitioners encountered during my development as an artist have also influenced the way I think about practice. Tom Breakwell, with whom I studied at art school, is one such practitioner. Tom was also a photographic subject for me on several occasions during those years, creating another connection between our respective practices. I have continued to admire the poetic quality of his work and, particularly, the inquisitiveness of his mind — his willingness to question, explore and approach ideas from unexpected directions. His example reminds me that artistic development is shaped not only by those who formally teach us, but also by the practitioners we encounter along the way: people whose work, curiosity and ways of seeing remain with us and continue to inform our own thinking.

There have been many others: teachers, artists, printmakers, writers, fellow practitioners and colleagues encountered at different moments. Each has contributed something to the way I understand images and artistic practice.

Seen in this way, my artistic education has never really stopped.

Formal university study became part of a much larger process of continuing enquiry rather than its beginning or end. Workshops, conversations, travel, reading, exhibitions, technical experimentation and the repeated experience of making have all contributed to the development of the practice.

This perhaps explains why undertaking a PhD now feels logical.

I am not seeking a doctorate in order to become an artist. Nor do I need a PhD simply to produce another series of photographs or another body of artwork. I have been doing those things for much of my life.

What has changed is the nature of the questions I am asking.

I have become increasingly interested in understanding the relationships between the things I have accumulated: photographs, artworks, objects, places, journeys, memories, books, research journals, technical knowledge and experiences of making. Projects that once appeared independent are beginning to reveal connections across decades. Earlier works return unexpectedly within new projects. Objects trigger memories. Places recur. Processes learned many years ago acquire new relevance. Photography moves into printmaking, painting, artist’s books, material objects and digital forms.

The development of The Living Archive has made these relationships increasingly visible.

The archive began partly from the practical need to organise an extensive body of work and research. It is becoming something quite different. Rather than simply documenting what I have done, it allows earlier and current work to encounter one another. It exposes continuities, repetitions and changes that I could not necessarily see when individual works were made.

In this respect, even the Kodak Retina IIC becomes part of the research.

It connects family history, photography, material culture, memory and personal identity. It connects the photographic practices of the 1920s and 1930s with a camera given to a child, and that child’s subsequent journey through analogue photography, darkroom practice, transparency film, large- and medium-format photography, digital imaging and the iPhone; through printmaking, painting and expanded image-making.

The object survives while the technologies around it change.

Perhaps this is also why the idea of legacy has begun to surface so persistently across apparently different areas of my practice.

Legacy is present in Continuum, where materials from an earlier quilt project are being incorporated with materials accumulated subsequently to create something new. It is present in my work with domestic objects and possessions. It is present in the Research Journals and in the desire to make decades of artistic enquiry accessible through The Living Archive. And it is present in my recognition of the photographic knowledge handed to me by my parents and my aunt.

But legacy is not simply what we leave behind.

It is also what we receive, what we transform, and what we pass forward.

In that sense there are several intertwined lineages within my practice: the photographic lineage of my family; the artistic and intellectual lineage of teachers and supervisors; the technical lineage transmitted through photographers and printmakers; and the reciprocal knowledge generated through friendships with fellow practitioners.

I have inherited knowledge from others, transformed it through my own experience and, in doing so, become part of its continuing transmission.

Legacy, therefore, need not mean looking backwards.

What interests me is the possibility that inheritance and accumulated experience can become generative. An archive can produce new work. An old photograph can generate a contemporary image. A traditional printmaking process can transform a digital photograph. A camera inherited decades ago can prompt questions about objects, memory and identity. An image made spontaneously on an iPhone can become the beginning of an artist’s book or print. A journey to Berlin or Florence can cause earlier Australian work to be understood differently.

Seen from this perspective, my proposed PhD is not the culmination of my practice in the sense of bringing it to an end. I would prefer to think of it as another opening.

It provides an opportunity to subject this accumulated experience to sustained critical enquiry: to ask what it means, how its different components relate to one another, and what forms of artistic knowledge might emerge when a lifetime of practice is treated not as a completed history but as a living field of possibilities.

There is an intriguing continuity in this.

My photographic story reaches backwards through my parents and Anna to a photographic studio tradition established before 1900. It passes through darkrooms, retouched negatives and hand-coloured sepia prints; through Kodak slides, roll film and sheet film; through 35mm, large-format and medium-format cameras; through digital cameras and now the iPhone; through painting, printmaking, artist’s books, objects and archives.

Along that path are the people who have shared knowledge with me — family, teachers, supervisors, photographers, printmakers and fellow artists — and the places in which that knowledge has been tested and transformed.

And now that path reaches towards doctoral research.

Photography, in that sense, is more than a medium I chose.

It is part of my DNA.

The PhD offers an opportunity not simply to celebrate that inheritance, but to interrogate it: to understand what has been transmitted, what I have added to it, how it has shaped the artist I have become, and how that accumulated knowledge might now be transformed into something new.